I will continue blogging about my Cetis work from my general work blog, “Sharing and learning” This is so that I don’t have to maintain separate sites for Cetis work, other projects and reflections on teaching. My posts about Cetis work will still be aggregated into the Cetis blogs site which is probably how most of you get here, but if you’re used to coming direct to this page please change your bookmarks / feed settings:

As I said, Wilbert and I are building a Google custom search engine for LRMI-tagged pages. We got a basic search that finds pages that have an educational alignment and matches a search term. Next step is using the properties of the educational alignment to filter the search result based on things that teachers care about. Our friends at a11y showed us how to do the filtering based on properties with their search demo which uses the search modifiermore:p:videoobject-accessibilityfeature:captions
to filter results that have schema.org markup showing that they contain captions.

We took our alignment object custom search search and under search features, added refinements along the lines of more:p:AlignmentObject-name:GCSE with the label GCSE (a school exam taken by 16 year olds).

The results page for our Declaration of Arbroath now has tabs, one of which says GCSE. Click on that tab and you see just the results that have been marked up to say that they are relevant to the that educational level.

Google search for declaration of Arbroath filtered for those resources that are useful for UK GCSE exams.

Try some searches here. We could add more pre-set alignments, different grade levels and so on, but we’re just trying to do proof of concept here, not create a service, so we’ll stop at showing a few.

Issues

I’m really happy to see so many pages marked up with the schema.org/LRMI properties, way more than I knew of. But so much of it is wrong. In the example above, the refinement more:p:AlignmentObject-name:GCSE is filtering for pages that say that the AlingmentObject has a name of “GCSE”. This is wrong. That’s not the name of the AlignmentObject, that’s the name of the target in the educational framework to which an alignment is being asserted. If it’s not clear what the difference is, I wrote a post explaining the alignment object at at some length.

Also, we’ve found our first alignment object spam! Well, let’s say that the alignment was tenuous, and probably this page getting found would be of more use to the publisher that the person finding it. [I’m not linking to it for obvious reasons.] This is the sort of thing that killed the idea of hiding metadata in elements in the header. How would a search engine deal with this sort of spamming of alignment assertions? Well, if the educational alignment you’re asserting isn’t worth showing as human readable text on a webpage then it probably isn’t a strong one. So, remember this advice if you’re hiding all your metadata away rather than marking up what the reader will see on the page.

Wilbert and I are spending the day trying to create a search engine for finding learning resources by searching LRMI-tagged web pages. A bit of code sprint if you like.

First attempt: standard custom search engine hosted by Google.
1. Go to https://www.google.com/cse/ set up new search engine. Choose option to “Restrict Pages using Schema.org Types” to CreativeWork.

We’ll use “Declaration of Arbroath as a test search. By way of baseline, here’s the what we get just searching Google for that:

Google search for declaration of Arborath

With the Custom Search Engine, limited to Creative works, we get:

Google search result page for “Declaration of Arbroath” limited to Creative works

OK, so there is some difference, but CreativeWorks aren’t all learning resources (or at least they’re not all tagged with LRMI), so change the schema type we filter on to AlignmentObject, one of the properties LRMI added to schema.org, and we get

Google search result page for “Declaration of Arbroath” limited to pages with an AligmentObject.

Which is showing six learning resources tagged with LRMI.

We’re winning. You can try it here. It’s a good way of finding who is already using LRMI (waves to BBC and Open University)

I had the pleasure yesterday to talk on the Mozilla Open Badges community call about how LRMI and Open Badges may intersect. Open Badges are a means of displaying digital recognition of skills and achievements, there’s a technical framework behind the badges that offers the means of providing data in support of the claimed achievement. A particular part of this technical framework is the assertion specification, which includes a pointer from each badge to “the educational standards this badge aligns to, if any”. This parallels the LRMI alignment object very closely: in short the educationalAlignment property that LMRI added to schema.org allows encoding of statements along the lines of “this resource [teaches|assess|requires|has level] X” where X is some point in an shared educational framework, e.g. of attainment standards, topics or educational levels or shared curriculum. Diagrammatically

The creative work aligns with a node in an educational framework. The alignment object identifies that node and the nature of the alignment.

The badge information includes an assertion that the skill or achievement aligns with some point in an educational standard

Not only do the LRMI and Open Badge alignment objects both do the same thing they seem to have have the following semantically equivalent properties relating to identifying the thing that is aligned to:

(I like to think that this is not coincidence, but I don’t know how the similarity arose.)

The differences:

Open Badges do not identify the type of alignment. It has no need, I guess, since the alignment is always one of “asserts ability at” or something similar. LRMI currently recommends no relevant value.

Open Badges do not name the framework, I guess the assume that identifying the node will lead to knowledge of the framework. LRMI felt that this would not always be enough.

The LRMI alignment object can be used in conjunction with a property of schema.org/CreativeWorks, I don’t think Mozilla open badge assertions are creative works in that sense, I think they are some type of schema.org/Intangible.

Syntactically, OpenBadge assertions are made using JSON, I don’t think they use microdata. Through schema.org, LRMI uses microdata and JSON-LD.

aligning the alignment objects

The discussion that I hope to kick off with the Mozilla Open Badge and LRMI communities is should/could we make the similarities between the two alignment objects more explicit? This would give developers a two-for-one offer, understand the way Open Badges expresses alignment and you’ve understood what LRMI does, and vice versa. I don’t suppose either group wants to change a spec that is in productive use, but an informative statement about the similarities could be provided without changing either.

Beyond that I wonder if the Open Badge community have thought about use of schema.org when advertising badges, i.e. if you provide a webpage saying “we offer the following badges for X, Y and Z” would there be benefit in marking this up with schema.org microdata to improve discoverability by search engines? If there is benefit in doing so, then it would be worth thinking about what type of schema.org Thing badges are and how the LRMI alignment object might be attached to it.

The bigger picture is that someone working with the starting point of wanting to learn about something could find resources to help them learn it with the help of LRMI alignments and discover the means of showing that they had learnt it via Open Badge alignments.

The educational alignment property and the associated alignment object that LRMI introduced into schema.org have been described as the “killer feature” for LRMI. However, I know from the number of questions asked about the alignment object and from examples I have seen of it being used wrongly that it is not the easiest construct to understand.

Perhaps the problems come from the nature of the alignment object as a conceptual abstraction, so maybe it will be help to show some concrete examples of how it may be used. However, bear in mind that the abstraction was a deliberate design decision made so that the alignment object should be more widely applicable than the examples given here. So I will first discuss a little about why some simpler more direct approaches were considered and rejected (as were some approaches that would be even more abstract).

basic use case

The general use case for which the alignment object was introduced to meet was , in brief,

“help people find resources that can be useful in teaching or learning in some specific scenario.”

That looks deceptively simple. The complications come when defining the “specific scenario” and unpacking the word “useful”.

enter “educational frameworks”

One practical approach to defining various aspects of the specific scenario involves reference to an educational framework of some sort. By educational framework I mean a structured description of educational concepts such as a shared curriculum, syllabus or set of learning objectives, or a vocabulary for describing some other aspect of education such as educational levels or reading ability.

“Educational framework” is a deliberately broad concept as we wanted LRMI to be applicable globally and across many levels and modes of education. Some specific examples are school-level curricula or attainment standards such as:

various empirical measures of reading difficulty, for example general idea of “reading age” and the specific measures of reading ability and text level used by lexile.

One the other hand you may just want to specify the subject being taught, or the educational discipline for which is it being taught. Various classifcation schemes for academic subjects are available, for example:

All of these frameworks (and many others) may be used to describe aspects of an educational scenario.

ways of being useful

Life isn’t simple enough for us to meet the use case described above by adding a single property to schema.org Creative Works to say that the resource “aligns with” (i.e. is useful in the context defined by) some entry or node in an educational framework. In prescribing a “useful” resource we would want to distinguish between resources that teach and asses a topic; we also want a resource that assumes suitable previous knowledge, or requires some specific reading level, or assumes a certain general academic level. There may be other forms of alignment. There isn’t agreement on a minimum core set of properties required to address that word “useful” in the use case, but there is agreement that a resource can “align” with an “educational framework” in several ways, some of which we can enumerate. Hence the birth of the alignment property and abstract Educational Alignment object.

the abstraction

I think of it like this:

We start with a Creative work:

and an educational framework:(Note, there is no schema.org class of type EducationalFramework, but we assume that we can refer to some of the following properties pertaining to it: some text that identifies the framework as whole (let’s call it a name), and the URLs, names and/or descriptions of nodes within the framework.)

The alignment object was created to describe the relationship between the two. The following properties alignment objects are defined: educationalFramework, which can be used to hold text that identifies the educational framework you are pointing to; targetDescription, targetName and targetURL, which can hold the values that correspond to properties we assumed that nodes in the educational framework would have. It also has an alignmentType property that I think of switching the object to specify the different types of alignment that are possible. So we can put them together to express an alignment between a creative work and some node in an educational framework:

common mistakes

I have seen both of these mistakes in actual markup of webpages.

1. the alignment object on its own is fairly meaningless. Unless it is referenced by the educational Alignment property of a creative work it’s as useful as half a link.

2. since the alignment object is a proper schema.org Thing (to be specific a subtype of an Intangible Thing) it inherits the properties that every schema.org Thing has. e.g. a name, a URL, a description an image. Some of these make some sense in some cases (see below) but importantly, none of them are used in expressing the alignment: the url of an alignment object is not the same as the url of the creative work or the node to which it aligns.

real-world examples of alignment assertions

I would like to use two real-world examples of where services provide information that can be seen as an assertion that a resource is useful in connection with (i.e. aligns with) an educational framework:

1. Kritikos, where students can tell other students what is useful for their course.

Kritikos is a custom search engine for visual media relevant to teaching and learning engineering. In part the customisation comes through the use of a Google CSE, but more relevant to this post is the part that comes through allowing users to classify whether resources found on it are useful for specific courses [aside: this part of the kritikos service is built on a Learning Registry node].

The example shown here is the kritikos information page for a video of a lecture from MIT Open CourseWare. It includes “what others are saying about this resource” with the information from a year 3 MEng Aerospace Engineering student that it is relevant to “Flight Dynamics and Control”. The link from this assertion leads to other resources deemed useful by users for that module. “Flight Dynamics and Control” is a module at the University of Liverpool (code AERO317) that exists within the framework of Liverpool’s Aerospace Engineering programme. It is worth noting that kritikos can also be used to record when a resource is not relevant to a course–this is useful for weeding out false positives that get through the Google custom search engine. [Disclosure/bragging: I had an advisory role in the project that lead to kritikos.]

So, there’s an expression of an educational alignment; how does it relate to the alignment object?

The creative work in question is the MIT lecture (to be precise it’s a http://schema.org/VideoObject), we could describe a few of its characteristics with schema.org properties:
name = “Lec 7 | MIT 16.885J Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005″
url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QRfkG7jOfY
duration = PT110M22S
I’m not guessing this, the YouTube page has Schema.org microdata in it.

The node in the educational framework is a bit less well defined, but we would be justified in calling the module description a node in a framework called “University of Liverpool Modules” and saying the name for this node is “AERO317″, its description is “Flight Dynamics and Control”. It has a page on the web which gives us a url, http://tulip.liv.ac.uk/mods/vital/vital_AERO317_200809.htm. So we can express the alignment:

What about the other properties of the AlignmentObject, the ones it inherited by virtue of being an official Intangible Thing in the schema.org hierarchy? Well you could envisage the image property pointing to the screenshot above, and the url property being a url with a fragment identifier that points to the “what others are saying” part of the kritikos page. Sure, you can give it a name and descriptions if you want to. Maybe these aren’t especially useful, but the point it that they are clearly different from the url, name and description of the University of Liverpool course to which the MITOCW video aligns.

2. OER Commons, aligning to US Common Core State Standards

I’ll cover this in less detail. The main problem with the example above is that the educational framework, while locally useful, is somewhat ad hoc we had to kind of look at the course structure at Liverpool University in a certain way to see it as an educational framework. Better examples of a more widely shared and more formally constructed educational frameworks are those of the US Common Core State Standards Initiative. OER Commons is a repository and search engine for Open Educational Resources that expresses alignment to these frameworks in its descriptions.

The screenshot on the left shows such an alignment being displayed (the image links to the actual page in question, which is more legible). You see that in this case the creative work called “Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate” aligns with the Common Core Standard “CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.1.9 : Compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in stories.”

Interestingly there is some other information given about the “degree of alignment”, i.e. how good a match that resource is to teaching that State Standard.

justification for the abstraction of the alignment object

In part the motivation for creating an alignment object class in schema.org was the issue mentioned above about not knowing what might be all the possible forms of alignment between a resource and an educational framework used to characterise some aspect of a teaching and learning scenario. However I hope the examples above go someway to showing that alignments are real (if intangible) things, you can give them URLs, and names if you want. Furthermore they do have properties. For example, they are asserted by someone: a student at Liverpool University in the kritikos example and a user of OER Commons in the other. In the OER Commons example there is other information about the degree of alignment. This goes some way to convincing me that the alignment object isn’t just some computer science trick of indirection.

Even in the knowledge that current mainstream EPUB readers and applications for managing eBooks will most likely ignore all but the most trivial metadata, we still have use cases that involve more sophisticate metadata. For example we would like to use the LRMI alignment object in schema.org to say that a particular subsection of a book can be useful in the context of a specific unit in a shared curriculum.

So, without evaluating pros and cons, starting from the most basic/most common, what are the options? This is a summary takes information from Garrish and Gulling, EPUB 3 Best Practices, OReilly 2013, (which I take to be authoritative and also as an example of best practice with regard to the metadata in the epub file) as well as the EPUB 3.0 Publications and Content Documents specifications. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

1. Simple Dublin Core

Within the OEPBS directory of an unpacked EPUB3 is the content.opf file. It pretty much equates to the manifest of an IMS Content Package. The top-level element is <package> and <metadata> is a required first child of <package>.

The default metadata vocabulary is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES, simple DC), with prefix dc:. Three elements are mandatory–title, identifier and language–others are optional. For example, in /OEPBS/content.opf

2 Other metadata schemas

The package element has a prefix attribute that may be used to declare prefixes for metadata schemas other than DCMES. Four vocabularies are reserved, i.e. the prefix may be used without a declaration: dcterms, marc, onix and media (the vocabulary used for EPUB3 media overlays). Example

<dcterms:title>EPUB 3 Best Practices</dcterms:title>

Other vocabularies may be used providing a prefix and a URL in a way so similar to xmlns that is makes you wonder why they didn’t just use xmlns.

3 the meta element

If used without the refines attribute (see below) the meta element can provide information about the package as a whole, e.g.

<meta property="dcterms:title">EPUB 3 Best Practices</meta>

I have no idea what would be the benefit of this over <dcterms:title>.

4 Refining metadata elements: id attribute and the meta element

The id attribute can be used to provide an identifier any element in the metadata that it may be refined. One example of this is mandatory, i.e. that one occurrence of the dc:identifier element must be the publication identifier:

In general the refinements are described using the meta element with the refines attribute and a property attribute that specifies the nature of the refinement. It’s kind of like RDF reification. The default vocabulary for the property attribute includes “file-as” – an alternative string for a name to be used when filing, “identifier-type” – a way to distinguish between different identifiers, “meta-auth” – the authority for a given instance of metadata, “title-type” – which of the six forms of title being provided.

Terms from other vocabularies may be used for “property” so long as a prefix is declared.

Refinements may have ids and so may be refined.

<meta refines="#5678" property="meta-auth">Phil Barker</meta>

So and so you can make statements about your metadata statements to you heart’s content (though including the whole of the linked data graph in each epub would be silly).

The scheme attribute may be used to identify the controlled vocabulary from which the meta element’s value is drawn. For example, if the identifier is a DOI (which in onix is apparently entry 06 of codelist 5) you can have

5 Sub-package level metadata

The id attribute may be used to provide an identifier of an subelement of <package> or any element in the XHTML content documents, down to a span element around a phrase, word or character. So a chapter may have id=”chap1″ then we can use meta elements in the metadata to describe it seperately from the rest of the epub

<meta refines="#chap1" property="prism:contentType">bookChapter<meta>

6 Links to metadata records

The link element is an optional, repeatable subelement of <metadata>, “used to associate resources with a publication, such as metadata records” The metadata may be within package or anywhere on the www.
Example

Metadata embedded in the XHTML5 content

As far as I can see the EPUB3 specs are mute on metadata in HTML of the content documents, e.g. as html:meta elements or as microdata or RDFa, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why one should not put metadata here. I wouldn’t expect any EPUB system to look that deeply into the package but it would be a good approach to helping the metadata travel with the resource if the EPUB is disaggregated and passed into a non-EPUB3 CMS.

This is a longish summary of a presentation I gave recently, covering why I was talking, the spectrum of openness, the ways of being open, the range of activities involved in education and how open things might apply to those activities. You may want to skim through until something catches your eye

Why I did this

When Mariekeasked me to give a “general introduction to open education” for the Open Knowledge Foundation / LinkedUp ProjectOpen Education Handbook booksprint I admit I was somewhat nervous. More so when I saw the invite list. I mean, I’ve worked on OERs for a few years, mostly specializing in technologies for managing their dissemination and discovery; I’ve even helped write a book about that, (which incidentally was the output of a booksprint, about which I have also written), but that only covers a small part of the OER endeavour, and OERs are only a small element in the Open Education movement, and I saw the list of invitees to the booksprint and could see names of people who knew much more than me.

However Martin Poulter then asked this on Twitter

Anyone remember who said that the way to get information on the internet is not to ask for info but to give false info? Google isn't helping

and I thought why not take inspiration from that approach. I can say stuff, and if it is wrong someone will put me right; it’ll be like learning about things. I like learning things, I like Open Education and I like booksprints. So this is what I said.

I wanted to emphasize that Open Education covers a wide range of activities. It has a long history, which we can see in the name of institutions like the Open University, but has recently taken on new impetus in a new direction, not disconnected with that history, but not entirely the same. Being a bit of a reductionist, the simple way to illustrate the range of Open Education was to reflect on the extent and range of meanings of Open and the range of activities that may be involved in education.

The spectrum of openness

A “map” of IP rights and freedoms to show people use and view the different “permissions” (some legal, some illegal), BY DAVID EAVES, from http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/24244/beyond-property-rights-thinking-about-moral-definitions-openness

A couple of weeks ago this discussion on the spectrum of open passed through twitter. At one extreme you have “proprietary”, i.e. the commercially licensed use of other people’s resources covered by copyright or patents. Is this open? Well not in the sense of Open in OERs, but it is more open than material which is covered by non-disclosure agreements or trade secrets, and “fair use” or “fair dealing” may sometimes offer an exemption to needing a licence. So it makes sense to start the spectrum of openness here. Then you move to more liberal licences, say Creative Commons Licenses with ND or NC restrictions, through Share Alike to the most liberal attribution-only (CC:BY) and unrestricted (CC:0) licences. And then you pass into illegal use which ignores property rights, for personal use, for sharing (piracy) or claims that something is what it isn’t (counterfeiting).

When using, sharing and repurposing resources, teachers tend to work in the part of the spectrum spanning from proprietary through to the ignoring of property rights. It is interesting to reflect that much technical effort has been spent on facilitating the former (think Athens, ShibbolethAccess Management Federation, and single sign-on solutions for identification, authentication and authorisation), political effort on legitimising some of the latter (e.g. use of orphan works, exemptions for text mining) and educational effort on avoiding what is not legitimate. One of the benefits of the OER/Open Access approach is in avoiding effort.

The ways of being open

That all focusses on open access to and use of resources, but there are other ways of being open, seen in terms such as “open development” “open practice” “open university” and even “open prison” which all have something to do with who you allow to participate in what. There is much gnashing of teeth when this sense of openness gets confused with openness of access and use; for example complaints that a standard isn’t open because it costs money or that an online course isn’t open because the resources used cannot be copied. Yes you could spend the rest of your life trying to distinguish between “open” “free” and “libre”, but in real life words don’t align with nice neat categories of meaning like that.

I don’t think participation has to be open to everyone for a process to be described as open. As with openness in access and use, openness in participation can happen to various extents: towards one end of the spectrum, participation in IMS specification development is open to anyone who pays to be a member, ISO standardization processes are open to any national standardization body; wikipedia is an obvious example of a more open approach.

This form of openness is really interesting to me because I think that through sharing the development of resources we may see an improvement in their quality. I think that the OER work to date has largely missed this. And incidentally, having a hand in the development of a resource makes someone more likely to use that resource.

Activities involved in education

I think this picture does a reasonable job of showing the range of activities that may be involved in education, and I’ll stress from the outset that they don’t all have to be, some forms of education will only involve one or two of these activities.

The range of activities related to education.

Running down the diagonal you have the core processes of formal education (but note well: this isn’t a waterfall project plan, I’m not saying each one happens when the other is complete): policy at a national through to institutional level on how institutions are run, for example who gets to learn what and how, and who pays for it; administration, dealing with recruitment, admissions, retention, progression, graduation, timetabling, reporting, and so on; teaching, to use an old-fashioned term to include mentoring and all non-instructivist activities around the deliberate nurturing of knowledge; learning, which may be the only necessary activity here; assessment, not just summative, but also formative and diagnostic–remember, this isn’t a waterfall; and accreditation, saying who learnt what. Around these you have academic and business topics that inform or influence these processes: politics, management studies, pedagogy, psychology, philosophy, library functions, and Human Resource functions such as recruitment and staff development.

Open Education

OER interest tends to focus on the teaching, learning, assessment nexus at the middle of this picture, but Open Education should be, and is, wider. Maybe it would be useful to try to map where some of the other open endeavours fit. Open Badges, for example sit squarely on accreditation. Open Educational Practice sits somewhere around teaching and pedagogy. Open Access to research outputs sits roughly where OER does, but also with added implications to pedagogy, psychology, management and philosophy as research fields. Open research in general sits with these research fields but is also a useful way of learning. Open data is a bit tricky since it depends what you do with it, but the linked-up veni challenge submissions showed interesting ideas around library functions such as resource discovery, and around policy and administration, and learning analytics kind of comes under teaching. Similarly with Open Source Software and Open Standards, they cover pretty much everything on the main diagonal from Admin to assessment (including library). And MOOCs? well, the openness is in admission policy, so I’ve put them there. I suspect there is a missing “open learning” that sits over learning and covers informal education and much of what the original cMOOC pioneers were interested in.

How various open endeavours relate to education to give open education.

This thought on etextbooks is an overflow from a conversation I was having on skype with Li and Tore about a workshop aimed at scoping what we would like the etextbooks of the future to look like. We were talking about how the idea of a textbook–its role in teaching and learning and hence (perhaps) its nature–was different in different cultures (Europe, US, Asia) and educational settings (school, higher education), when Tore said something along the lines of “why are are discussing this, shouldn’t we be talking about educational requirements”. Of course we should be talking about educational requirements and how they might be met by technologies such as ebooks, but I think there is more than that. My immediate reply was that by defining an area of interest as “etextbooks” we were implying a continuity with textbooks. I don’t think continuity implies a simple like-for-like replacement because I think the potential for etextbooks is far greater than that for paper textbooks, so moving to etextbooks should radically shift the trajectory of change. But the implication seems to be that etextbooks will pick up where paper text books leave off. That, I think is different from 20 or so years ago when we were talking about how computer based learning (or more recently online courses and technology enhanced learning) marked a step change in how education was delivered. In that case much of the talk was about how technology will radically change education. Even if my characterisation of the two cases as opposing is a bit crude (as it is), it’s worth comparing the two approaches. I’ll do that here, just briefly.

The technology-will-revolutionise-education approach runs the risk of alienating the people who you most need on your side if that revolutionary change is to be an improvement, that is the teachers and students. I remember we used to talk about technology as a Trojan Horse for introducing pedagogic improvement in HE, something that I stopped doing when I went to a presentation where the speaker pointed out that the Trojan Horse was an act of war in the context of a bloody siege, and perhaps that isn’t the way learning technologists should approach teachers. More importantly, introducing technology probably isn’t the best way to approach improving education. Introducing technology is not straightforward, it will take attention away from other matters: whatever the initial intent, it will distract from thinking about teaching and learning. If you want to improve education you should focus on that and probably not do something else that is really difficult in it’s own right at the same time.

So the start-with-something-familiar approach has an advantage here in that it simply focuses on planting a technology with higher potential into existing practice. The risk is that substiution is seen as as all that needs to be done, or that requirements that arise from this objective are over prioritised. For example, I have seen requirements for page-faithful display (i.e. the ability to reproduce on the ebook reader exactly what would be on paper) and page numbers as requirements for etextbooks. They may be desirable for marketing purposes, and there are real functional requirements relating to how content is presented and how it may be referenced, but building-in these restrictions as requirements would, in my view, be a mistake. Let’s have a strategy where we aim to embed but with a view to enhancing.

I think this is the approach which is suggested by the recent report on the Educause/Internet2 pilots Understanding what higher education needs from e-textbooks, summarised in the image on the right. I must admit that I find this somewhat depressing, I am interested in getting to the peak of that pyramid as quickly as possible, but I would rather get there with teachers and learners than to be touting some theoretical improvement that is divorced from real teaching and learning. And of course, it’s important to be thinking from the outset what functionality and innovation should be built once the technology is in people’s hands.

I am presenting a session at Alt-C 2013 entitled Into the Mainstream? New developments in eTextBooks next month where I hope to discuss ideas like this.

JACS is mainatained by HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) and UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) as a means of classifying UK University courses by subject; it is also used by a number of other organisations for classification of other resources, for example teaching and learning resources. The report (with appendices) considers the varying requirements and uses of subject coding in HE and sets out options for the development of a replacement for JACS.

Of course, this is all only of glancing interest, until you realise that stuff like Unistats and the Key Information Set (KIS) are powered by JACS. - See more at Followers of the apocalypse

If you’re not sure why this should interest you (and yet for some reason have read this far) David Kernohan has written what I can only describe as an appreciation of the report, Hit the road JACS, from which the quote above is taken.

One of the issues around eTextBooks is how to describe them, specifically by way of educational metadata in ePub. That’s something that on the face of it shouldn’t be too difficult to address (at least to the extent that we know how to describe any educational resource). One thing that would be useful in demonstrating different choices for educational metadata is an app or tool that will display any metadata found in the ePub package in a sensible way. As a bit of long shot I tried four eBook readers to see whether they would; they don’t. The details follow, if you’re interested, but do let me know if you know of any tool that might be useful.

The package metadata of an ePub can include a selection of Dublin Core elements and terms. These can be refined, for example you may have two dc:title elements with refinements to specify that one is the main title and the other the subtitle. You can also extend with elements from other XML namespaces, or if you prefer you can just link to a metadata record of your favourite flavour which can be either inside the ePub package or elsewhere on the web. Any of this metadata can relate to the eBook as a whole or some part of it, e.g. a single chapter or image. Without going into details there seems to be enough scope there to experiment with how educational characteristics of the eBook might be described.

But how to see the results? I took an ePub (a copy of O’reily’s EPUB 3 Best Practices, since it seemed likely to provide as good a starting point as I was going to find in a real book), made a copy, unzipped it and changed the values of the meta elements so that I could easily identify what elements were being displayed. For example I changed<dc:title id="pub-title">EPUB 3 Best Practices</dc:title> to<dc:title id="pub-title">dc:title</dc:title> and so on.

Here’s a list of the metadata elements in that file:

<dc:title id="pub-title">

<dc:creator id="..." >

<dc:publisher>

<dc:date>

<meta property="dcterms:modified">

<dc:identifier id="pub-identifier">

<dc:language id="pub-language">

<dc:contributor> (repeated)

<dc:rights>

<dc:subject>

<dc:description>

<meta id="meta-identifier" property="dcterms:identifier">

<meta property="dcterms:title" id="meta-title">

<meta property="dcterms:language" id="meta-language">

<meta property="dcterms:rights">

<meta property="dcterms:rightsHolder">

<meta property="dcterms:publisher">

<meta property="dcterms:subject">

<meta property="dcterms:description>

<meta id="...." property="dcterms:creator"> (repeated, different ids)

<meta name="cover" content="cover-image"/>

<meta property="ibooks:specified-fonts">

I then looked at this with various eBook readers:

Readium

I had hopes for Readium since it is pretty much the reference implementation of EPUB3. It displayed

in Readium

dc:title

dc:creator

dc:publisher

dc:date

meta dcterms:modified

dc:identifier

Note that it doesn’t even check for a valid value for dates.

Calibre

Calibre, while it doesn’t claim to support ePub3 is targetted at managing personal book libraries. It displays:

in Calibre

dc:title

dc:creator

dc:subject (for tags)

dc:description

dc:publisher

It probably uses dc:language and dc:date (for published) as well but recognises that the values dc:language / dc:date aren’t valid.

Ideal Reader for Android

The Ideal Reader for Android is the other ePub3 reader I use. It displays

In Ideal Android Reader

dc:title

meta dcterms:creator (just one of them)

dc:date

dc:publisher

dc:description

dc:subject

dc:rights

iTunes

Finally I gave a chunk of diskspace to Apple

in iTunes desktop for Windows 7

dc:title

dc:creator

dc:title (again)

dc:subject (in the info tab, as Genre)

Yep, title is there twice: the info tab shows dc:title in the Name and Album fields, so you can gauge the amount of effort that Apple have put into adapting iTunes for books.

What did I learn?

I learnt that none of the ePub reading/management apps or tools that I have show more than the bare minimum of metadata, even if it is there. None of them will be much good for trying out ideas for how educationally characteristics can be described since I strongly suspect that none of it will be viewable. That’s not too surprising, especially when you consider that none of the tools I looked at are geared around resource discovery, but I can’t really go uploading dummy ePub files to book seller sites just to see what they look like. May be any meaningful exploration/demonstration of educational metadata in ePub is going to need a bespoke application, but if you know of a tool that might be helpful do drop me a line.